Trunk cams are video cameras carried by elephants, providing unique insights into their habitats. Different styles of trunk-cam exist, including lightweight base cams and tusk-cams, which can withstand harsh conditions. Elephants are ideal filmmakers due to their slow, steady pace and fearlessness in the jungle.
A trunk cam is a video camera designed to be carried by an elephant. While elephant filmmakers might sound a little ridiculous, trunk cameras can actually provide fascinating insights into the regions where elephants live, as these large animals can boldly enter territory that humans cannot reach. There are different styles of trunk-cam, designed to be used in different ways, and trunk-cam filming has garnered global attention on occasion, capturing events and scenes previously unseen by human eyes.
The inspiration for the back cams came from working elephants, which were used to carry firewood and other supplies to jungle camps used by biologists as research base stations. The researchers noticed that elephants carried firewood extremely delicately and realized that an elephant’s slow, steady pace could work much like a Steadicam in the jungle. So, they came up with a hidden camera inside a trunk that could be carried by an elephant.
A lightweight base cam can be picked up and carried by an elephant over long distances, and can run continuously or be triggered to react to movement in the camera view. Other cameras are heavier, so elephants carry them for a short time and then drop them, deploying hidden cameras throughout the jungle. Elephants can also be taught to release a cam when they spot a tiger or other creature of interest, and in some cases the cam can be operated remotely, allowing researchers to move it to get closer to the subject.
You can also see tusk-cams, lightweight cameras that are draped over an elephant’s tusks. A tusk-cam will accompany the elephant wherever it goes, with biologists watching the footage afterwards to find out where elephants go and what kind of creatures they encounter. These cameras are typically ruggedized to withstand harsh weather conditions, heavy impacts, and other hazards that can occur while filming, and can be quite expensive.
Elephants are great filmmakers not only because they move slowly and gently to film a fairly stable image, but also because they fear few things in the jungle. Elephants are generally respected by other animals and are willing to venture into remote and dangerous places because they are so large that they have few natural threats. They are also highly intelligent, and an elephant can be taught to use a video camera with skills that sometimes surpass those of human filmmakers.
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